He says it with all the brimming confidence of a Harvard-educated young man who knows what he’s talking about, who gets it, and it shows. By the time Alex is through, I’m speechless. And insanely turned on.
After, Tracy Garcia and Harold Cooper’s wife start clapping. I sneak a glance at Dougie, and here’s the thing: he looks genuinely won over. He even nods at Alex congenially, who meets his eyes, then looks away—at me—and winks.
All in all, it’s a freaking grand stroke. Nobody shits the bed, and everyone important seems convinced a million times over. When us underlings walk out of that room to give the board and execs time to deliberate, a raw and dangerous hope has already started to bloom in my chest.
Maybe Dougie’s gotten a second wind.
Maybe he hates Robert enough to make LC profitable again, just to prove he can.
Maybe we’re all going to get what we want.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
In the Urban Outfitters near our office building, I say to Alex, “I don’t understand how you’re not more anxious.”
He grabs a Santa hat off the rack and fits it onto my head, pulls it down over my eyes, then adjusts it to match my hairline, tapping the white pom-pom so it jingles. I peer up at his face, which is tired but strangely serene. His eyelashes almost touch his cheekbones every time he looks down at me like this. “Nothing more I can do at this point,” he answers calmly.
“That’s no excuse to be mentally fucking balanced right now?”
He doesn’t understand what’s at stake, and I know why—because I’m being forced to keep it from him—but how could I ever not be frustrated by his blasé attitude right now? With the holidays coming up, we may not find out the board’s decision for weeks. I’m going to be a nervous wreck until I know the outcome, and really, if I liked unknown variables, I’d be an algebra teacher.
Alex’s eyelashes go lower, and his hands travel down to my hips. “I love it when you curse. The whole sentence that brackets it gets really southern.”
“I don’t have an accent.”
He arches an eyebrow. “You do when you’re gearing up to say a curse word.” After a moment of consideration, he adds, “And when you’re hammered.”
“You wouldn’t know a southern accent if it hit you in the face.”
Alex claps back by speaking a full sentence of Korean to me.
I scowl. “Point made, asshole.”
He laughs and walks away.
We’re buying costumes for an ugly Christmas sweater party, hosted by one of Alex’s Harvard friends who is apparently an assistant art curator at MoMA （congrats to her）。 He texted me about it this afternoon, a non sequitur to my hours-earlier check-in about how he was feeling after this morning. I said yes to the party out of pity, thinking he’d need a distraction, but after the past half hour, I realize I’ve been duped.
Duped into my worst nightmare—a party where I don’t know a soul except the most social person invited. He’s going to leave my side immediately to catch up with his college friends, and I’m going to have to get drunk and suck it up.
He pulls a multicolored sweater vest with tinsel off the rack. “Do you like this?”
“Sure,” I grumble. “Now, can you please tell me how you really feel about the wait?”
Something flashes in Alex’s eyes—annoyance, and possibly fear—and that’s when I finally get it, one sentence too late: this is him coping.
“It’s out of my hands.” His voice cracks harshly, resolve breaking. “I did the best I could. I can’t control what other people think, how they react. I can’t make people care, okay?”
“Okay,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”
He drops the sweater and pinches the bridge of his nose. After a second, he reaches out to grab my hand and pulls me in, threading his fingers into my hair and slipping his arm under my blazer to clutch at my waist. “No, I’m sorry. I just…” He exhales. “I know myself. I have to let it go now, or it’s going to ruin me later. Holding on to things I wish I could change never got me anywhere.”
I get this mental flash of Alex building himself a castle. Walls of rough, impenetrable stone stacked together in a fortress to protect himself. But at the end of it all, he leaves the front door wide open. Waiting for someone to knock.
In this moment, I want to be whatever it is he needs most.
“Do you have to let it go like Elsa had to let it go?” I ask. “Because if so, might I recommend…” I step backward, out of his arms, and point to the Frozen costumes hanging beside the reindeer antlers.
His face twists. “I maybe could have fit into that dress when I was six. Isn’t this a store for preteens?”
“But you love Frozen!” I protest. “At least get the Olaf T-shirt.”
Alex rolls his eyes. “I can’t believe I told you about that.”
“About how you watch Frozen just to feel something?”
He glowers. “At least I don’t compulsively order a dessert I don’t actually want every time the waiter brings out a dessert menu without asking me first.”
My jaw drops. “I never told you that!”
He smirks. “Brijesh told me. I asked him about your fatal flaw, and that’s the answer I got.”
I blanch, betrayed. “Why were you asking about my fatal flaw?”
“So I can exploit it.” He rolls his eyes. “Obviously.”
In the end, I get a seven-dollar pleated maroon skirt, snowy-looking knee-highs, and a green button-down sweater. Alex gets that atrocious vest and the Santa hat.
We break up our subway trip to the Upper East Side with a stop in Koreatown—a small stretch of blocks near the Empire State Building—and go to a barbecue spot, randomly selected by Alex based on nothing other than “gut instinct and the fact that a fifteen-minute wait feels promising but not daunting.”
Inside, he makes me create a shared note on my phone, where I type out all my allergies. He considers them for a moment （sesame being the trickiest culprit）， and then orders for both of us.
The meat comes out raw, and our waiter tells us about each selection before he cooks it on the hot plate in the middle of our table. It’s kind of awkward at first, the waiter just standing there cooking while Alex and I watch, but eventually, Alex starts telling me about Seoul dining, regional Korean foods you can’t get here, and American staples harder to come by over there. I’m shocked by the list of things he’d never heard of until he moved to Connecticut. The waiter listens in, too, offering up his own opinions, and at one point they both start slipping into Korean.
Then we receive the banchan, some of which I am familiar with （read: kimchi and cucumbers）， some of which I am not （read: gamja salad）。 Truthfully, I’ve only had chain-restaurant Korean food before （read: bibimbap with steak and a fried egg on top）， which I admitted to Alex on the subway here. Now he’s watching me try everything, face attempting to conceal his curiosity, asking me if I’m still hungry and ordering more meats and banchan accordingly. Normally when I’m anxious about something, my appetite deserts me, but the food here is so amazing that I leave the place stuffed.